Jean-Philippe Rameau

French composer

• Born: September 25, 1683
• Birthplace: Dijon, France
• Died: September 12, 1764
• Place of death: Paris, France

Rameau was the outstanding French composer of his time. His music for the stage was of particular importance, as were his contributions to music theory. Rameau established the modern concept of harmonic practice.

Early Life

Jean-Philippe Rameau (zhahn-fee-leep rah-moh) was the seventh of eleven children born to Jean Rameau and his wife, Claudine (née Demartinecourt). His father was an organist of the collegiate Church of St. Étienne, as well as of the Abbey of St. Bénigne, and his mother was a member of the lesser nobility. His younger brother, Claude, also became a professional musician, serving as organist for various churches in Dijon and Autun. Jean-Philippe was intended for the law and to that end was sent to the Jesuit Collège des Godrans, where he apparently spent more time singing and writing music than studying and was asked to leave. At the age of eighteen, he was sent by his father to Italy to study music, but he traveled only as far as Milan, where he spent a few months before returning to Dijon.

In January, 1702, Rameau was appointed temporary organist at Avignon Cathedral, and in May of that year he signed a contract to serve for six years as organist of the cathedral in Clermont, seemingly prepared to embark on an unexceptional career as a provincial church musician. By 1706, however, he was in Paris, where he published his first collection of harpsichord music, Premier Livre de pièces de clavecin, consisting of a single large suite in a markedly conservative style. In March, 1709, he succeeded his father as organist at the Church of Notre Dame in Dijon. In July, 1713, he was at Lyons, where he directed the music in celebration of the Treaty of Utrecht and where he was also employed as organist by the Jacobins. In April, 1715, he returned to Clermont as cathedral organist, signing a contract to serve for twenty-nine years; he remained for only eight.

Nothing is known of Rameau’s time in Clermont, but either there or at Lyons he is thought to have written his five surviving motets and a similar number of cantatas. He also undertook the research and writing of his first book, Traité de l’harmonie (1722; Treatise on Harmony, 1971), which was published in Paris shortly before he relocated there permanently. He was then in his fortieth year and virtually unknown in the French music world.

Life’s Work

During his first years in Paris, Rameau was considered primarily a theorist and teacher, largely because of the success of the Treatise on Harmony and of his next work, Nouveau Système de musique théorique (1726; New System of Music Theory, 1974). He continued to compose, contributing music to productions of the Fair theaters (Théâtres de la Foire) and publishing his second and third collections of harpsichord music, Pièces de clavecin avec une méthode pour la mécanique des doights, in 1724, and Nouvelles Suites de pièces de clavecin, probably in 1728. Both contain a mixture of dances and genre pieces, organized by keys but not forming suites.

On February 25, 1726, Rameau married Marie-Louise Mangot, the daughter of a musician from Lyons in the service of the French court and herself an accomplished singer and harpsichordist. They had four children, two of whom survived Rameau. In 1727, he competed for the position of organist of the Church of St. Paul, but Louis-Claude Daquin was selected instead. In the same year, he wrote to Houdar de la Motte, a writer, and obliquely requested a libretto for an opera, but nothing came of the request.

Around this time, Rameau was introduced to the financier Le Riche de la Pouplinière, an avid patron of music and the arts, who from about 1731 maintained a private orchestra under Rameau’s direction that gave performances at his house in the rue Neuve des Petits-Champs. The meeting with la Pouplinière was to be the most significant event in Rameau’s career. Although from at least 1732 to 1738 he was organist of the Church of Ste. Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie and from 1736 to 1738 also organist at the Jesuit Novitiate, most of the remainder of Rameau’s life was spent under the patronage of la Pouplinière both as a theorist and as a composer of music for the stage.

Rameau’s first opera, a tragédie en musique (or tragédie lyrique) titled Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), was written to a libretto by Abbé Pellegrin based on Euripides’ and Jean Racine’s treatments of the Phaedra myth. In the tradition of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s operas, it consisted of a prologue and five acts, each interweaving divertissements of dance and singing into the dramatic narrative. Hippolyte et Aricie was premiered privately at la Pouplinière’s in July, 1733, and presented at the Paris Opera on October 1, 1733, shortly after Rameau’s fiftieth birthday, and was an immediate and overwhelming success.

Hippolyte et Aricie was virtually the first tragédie en musique to succeed at the opera since the death of Lully some forty-five years earlier. Although it was condemned by the conservative lullistes as being too Italianate, too contrapuntal, and too modern, the ramistes—who included most of the younger musicians—praised it extravagantly. The elderly composer André Campra remarked that “there is enough music in this opera to make ten of them; this man will eclipse us all.” Following upon the success of Hippolyte et Aricie, Rameau began composing a sacred opera to a libretto written for him by Voltaire. The work, entitled Samson, was largely completed by October, 1734, when a concert performance was given, but it never reached the stage and Rameau never again set such a distinguished librettro. Some of the music was apparently reused in Les Fětes d’Hébé (1739), Castor et Pollux (1737), and Zoroastre (1749).

Rameau then began a remarkable period of activity in which he completed nearly twenty operas or ballets over the course of the next twenty years. Rameau also continued his theoretical studies, which he considered at least as important as his efforts at composition. Among his many works of theory, the clearest and most readable is Démonstration du principe de l’harmonie (1750; Demonstration of the Principle of Harmony, 1976), on which he may have received help from Denis Diderot. As he approached his sixty-fifth birthday, Rameau was at the height of his fame. He had been granted a pension and the title of Compositeur du Cabinet du Roi in May, 1745, and would be granted a further pension in 1750. Objections to his music from the conservative lullistes had begun to recede, and some Frenchmen, including Diderot, could admit to recognizing strengths in both composers.

Rameau’s tall, thin figure and angular features were familiar to visitors to the gardens of the Tuileries and the Palais Royal, where he often walked alone. His physical resemblance to Voltaire was noted by his contemporaries and became more pronounced as both men grew older. Never a sociable man and always noted for his short temper, Rameau became even more acerbic in his later years. Despite accusations of avarice, however, he seems to have remained generous to his family and as openhearted to his few friends as he was implacable to his more numerous enemies in the field of music theory.

In 1752, an event occurred in Paris that had a startling effect on musical life in that city: a traveling troupe of Italian musicians performed Giovanni Pergolesi’s comic intermezzo La serva padrona and ignited the so-called War of the Buffoons over the relative merits of French and Italian music. Rameau, although he took no active part in the quarrel, was naturally cast in the role of representative of French music—and a particularly conservative representative at that. Shortly after this event, la Pouplinière, who had separated from his wife, an ardent Rameau supporter, in 1748 took a new mistress, who rapidly dismissed many of the old faces, including Rameau. La Pouplinière, whose tastes ran to the lighter Italian style, acquiesced in the dismissal, and Rameau left in 1752, soon to be replaced as music director by Johann Stamitz.

Rameau was now seventy, and for the remaining twelve years of his life he continued producing operas and ballets, though at a slower rate. His last completed work was a five-act tragédie lyrique entitled Abaris: Ou, Les Boréades, a remarkable achievement for one who was eighty years old. It was in rehearsal at the opera when Rameau died on September 12, 1764. It was replaced by a revival of an earlier work by André Campra and had to wait more than two hundred years for its premiere performance.

Significance

Jean-Philippe Rameau’s works for the theater form the culmination of the tradition of French Baroque opera begun by Lully. They also contain much of his greatest music. His first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, is also his masterpiece, as it successfully combines a truly dramatic plot with the traditional French love of spectacle and dance, and incorporating the chorus as a participant in the action. He also created authentically dramatic characters in Theseus and, to a lesser extent, Phaedra. Castor et Pollux also succeeds dramatically, even though the plot may not be said to be truly tragic, and again the divertissements are integrated into the action. The overall effect is gentler and more nostalgic than that of the earlier work.

In many ways, the most remarkable aspect of Rameau’s stage works is the astonishing variety of the instrumental music. He was an adept orchestrator, and this is shown most clearly in the descriptive symphonies such as those accompanying the appearance of the monster in Hippolyte et Aricie or the summoning of the winds in Abaris. His most appealing music is found in his symphonies de danse, which include examples ranging from courtly dances such as the gavotte to the newly popular contredanse and tambourin. In his overtures, he soon broke with the traditional Lullian slow-fast formula and composed programmatic overtures that presaged those of the nineteenth century.

Both Rameau’s harpsichord works and his Pièces de clavecin en concerts (1741) have remained in the repertoire, and he is especially remembered for his descriptive pieces such as Le Rappel des oiseaux and Les Cyclopes and his portraits of friends such as La Forqueray and La Cupis. Many of his keyboard dances reappeared for orchestra in his stage works. His sacred works and cantatas are less important, although they contain much fine music.

Rameau was perhaps more important in his own time as a theorist, and his works made a lasting impression on musical thought. He derived from a study of acoustics the principle of the fundamental bass, whereby each chord possessed a fundamental tone or root whose function was not determined by the lowest sounding pitch. This led to the concept of harmonic inversions, which could be applied either to intervals or to chords, and to the idea of chord progressions, which led in turn to the concept of functional harmony involving tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords and their substitutes. He also had much to say concerning the construction of the seventh chord and the liberal use of dissonance; the presence of both is what gives his own music much of its character. In his later years, he became increasingly fractious and pedantic, but his theories served as the basis for modern views of harmony in Western music.

Rameau seems to have been a man both of his age and apart from it. His theories are clearly the product of the Age of Reason, yet he continued to refer to the earlier concept of “good taste” (bon goût). His stage works embody Baroque grandeur dressed in less substantial rococo garb. Throughout his music, there is a sense of detachment, even disillusion, which probably reflects his own philosophy; yet there are moments of deep passion in nearly all of his major works. He was the dominant French musician of the High Baroque and is worthy to stand with Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel as the greatest composers of that era.

Bibliography

Anthony, James R. French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau. Rev. ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. A good introduction to the subject. The book ends with the rise of Rameau but includes brief discussions of some of his works.

Christensen, Thomas. Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Examines Rameau’s musical theories, describing their relationship to the musical and scientific ideas of René Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke, and other Enlightenment thinkers. Discusses Rameau’s relationship with the Encyclopedists, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot.

Dill, Charles. Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Depicts Rameau as a complicated man, obsessed with musical tradition and theory, his creative instincts, and the public’s often negative response to his dramatic style of opera.

Rameau, Jean-Philippe. Jean-Philippe Rameau: Complete Theoretical Writings. Edited by Erwin Jacobi. Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1967-1972. A facsimile edition of Rameau’s theoretical works in six volumes, with extensive prefatory material in English.

Rice, Paul F. Fontainebleau Operas for the Court of Louis XV of France by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764). Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. Examines Rameau’s operas, including information on Rousseau’s criticism of these works, audience response, and Rameau’s innovations in using the ariette, or short aria form.

Sadler, Graham, and Thomas Christensen. “Jean-Philippe Rameau.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell. London: Macmillan, 2001. The standard music reference article on Rameau, including a complete list of works and an extensive bibliography as well as a detailed biography.